The present invention relates generally to the field of electrocardiograms (ECG), and more specifically, automatic processing of electrocardiograms.
There has been an increased need for automatic processing of the electrocardiogram (ECG). Many systems have been developed to perform signal processing tasks such as 12-lead off-line ECG analysis, and real-time patient monitoring. These applications require an accurate detection of the heart rate by the ECG.
Although many hospitals now have digital ECG records, much of the ECG data is in paper form. Unlocking these ECG records printed on paper and exposing them to digital analysis would be useful.
Digital ECG recordings are sampled finely, and contain noisy data with baseline wandering problems. The heart beats that illustrate a disease may be carefully screened by technicians before taking the recording, so that the paper version may show only a few seconds of data needed for diagnosis
While it is difficult to estimate the heart cycle directly from a depicted heart region in a video, it is relatively easy to estimate the heart rate from a synchronizing ECG.
Hence, there is a need for a method and apparatus for determining a heart period using image representation obtained from an ECG.